Introductory Linguistics

Introductory Linguistics AAE - Abbreviates African American English. See Ebonics, AAVE. AAVE - Abbreviates African American Vernacular English. See Ebonics, AAE. abbreviation - Shortened form of a word: e.g., prof from professor. See clipping. abjad - Consonantal alphabet writing system; the consonantal alphabet of such a system. accent - (1) Prominence. See stressed syllable; (2) the phonology or pronunciation of a specific regional dialect: e.g., Southern accent; (3) the pronunciation of a language by a nonnative speaker: e.g., French accent. accidental gap - Phonological or morphological form that constitutes possible but nonoccurring lexical items: e.g., blick, unsad. acoustic - Pertaining to physical aspects of sound. acoustic phonetics - The study of the physical characteristics of speech sounds. acoustic signal - The sound waves produced by any sound source, including speech. acquired dyslexia - Loss of ability to read correctly following brain damage in persons who were previously literate. acronym - Word composed of the initials of several words and pronounced as such: e.g., PET scan from positron-emission tomography scan. See alphabetic abbreviation. active sentence - A sentence in which the noun phrase subject in d-structure is also the noun phrase subject in s-structure: e.g., The dog chased the car. See passive sentence. adjective (Adj) - The syntactic category, also lexical category, of words that function as the head of an adjective phrase, and that have the semantic effect of qualifying or describing the referents of nouns: e.g., tall, bright, intelligent. See adjective phrase. adjective phrase (AP) - A syntactic category, also phrasal category, whose head is an adjective possibly accompanied by premodifiers, that occurs inside noun phrases and as complements of the verb to be: e.g., worthy of praise, several miles high, green, more difficult. adverb (Adv) - The syntactic category, also lexical category, of words that qualify the verb such as manner adverbs like quickly and time adverbs like soon. The position of the adverb in the sentence depends on its semantic type: e.g., John will soon eat lunch, John eats lunch quickly. affix - A bound morpheme attached to a stem or root. See prefix, suffix, infix, circumfix, stem, root. affricate - A sound produced by a stop closure followed immediately by a slow release characteristic of a fricative; phonetically a sequence of stop + fricative: e.g., the ch in chip, which is [ʧ] and like [t] + [ʃ]. African American (Vernacular) English (AA(V)E) - Dialects of English spoken by some Americans of African descent, or by any person raised from infancy in a place where AAE is spoken. See Ebonics. agent - The thematic role of the noun phrase whose referent does the action described by the verb: e.g., George in George hugged Martha. agglutinative language - A type of synthetic language in which a word may be formed by a root and multiple affixes where the affixes are easily separated and always retain the same meaning. agrammatic aphasics - Persons suffering from agrammatism. agrammatism (agrammatic) - Language disorder usually resulting from damage to Broca's region in which the patient has difficulty with certain aspects of syntax, especially functional categories. See Broca's area. agreement - The process by which one word in a sentence is altered depending on a property of another word in that sentence, such as gender or number: e.g., the addition of s to a regular verb when the subject is third-person singular (in English). allomorph - Alternative phonetic form of a morpheme: e.g., the [-s], [-z], and [-əz] forms of the plural morpheme in cats, dogs, and kisses. allophone - A predictable phonetic realization of a phoneme: e.g., [p] and [p h ] are allophones of the phoneme /p/ in English. alphabetic abbreviation - A word composed of the initials of several words and pronounced letter-by-letter: e.g., MRI from magnetic resonance imaging. See acronym. alphabetic writing - A writing system in which each symbol typically represents one sound segment. alveolar - A sound produced by raising the tongue to the alveolar ridge: e.g., [s], [t], [n]. alveolar ridge - The part of the hard palate directly behind the upper front teeth. ambiguous, ambiguity - The terms used to describe a word, phrase, or sentence with multiple meanings. American Sign Language (ASL) - The sign language used by the deaf community in the United States. See sign languages. analogic change - A language change in which a rule spreads to previously unaffected forms: e.g., the plural of cow changed from the earlier kine to cows by the generalization of the plural formation rule or by analogy to regular plural forms. Also called internal borrowing. analogy - The use of one form as an exemplar by which other forms can be similarly constructed: e.g., based on bow/bows, sow/sows, English speakers began to say cows instead of the older kine. Analogy also leads speakers to say *brang as a past tense of bring based on sing/sang/sung, ring/rang/rung, and so on. analytic - Describes a sentence that is true by virtue of its meaning alone, irrespective of context: e.g., Kings are male. See contradiction. analytic language - A language in which most words contain a single morpheme, and there is little if any word morphology: e.g., there are no plural affixes on nouns or agreement affixes on verbs. Also called an isolating language. Vietnamese is an example of an analytic language. anomalous - Semantically ill-formed: e.g., Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. anomaly - A violation of semantic rules resulting in expressions that seem nonsensical: e.g., The verb crumpled the milk. anomia - A form of aphasia in which patients have word-finding difficulties. antecedent - A noun phrase with which a pronoun is coreferential: e.g., the man who is eating is the antecedent of the pronoun himself in the sentence The man who is eating bit himself. anterior - A phonetic feature of consonants whose place of articulation is in front of the palato-alveolar area, including labials, interdentals, and alveolars. antonymic pair - Two words that are pronounced the same (i.e., are homonyms) but spelled differently and whose meanings are opposite: e.g., raise and raze. See autoantonym. antonyms - Words that are opposite with respect to one of their semantic properties: e.g., tall/short are both alike in that they describe height, but opposite in regard to the extent of the height. See gradable pair, complementary pair, relational opposites. aphasia - Language loss or disorder following brain damage. approximants - Sounds in which the articulators have a near frictional closeness, but no actual friction occurs: e.g., [w], [j], [r], and [l] in English, where the first three are central approximants, and [l] is a lateral approximant. arbitrary - Describes the property of language, including sign language, whereby there is no natural or intrinsic relationship between the way a word is pronounced (or signed) and its meaning. arc - Part of the graphical depiction of a transition network represented as an arrow, often labeled, connecting two nodes. See node, transition network. argot - The specialized words used by a particular group, such as pilots or linguists: e.g., morphophonemics in linguistics. arguments - The various NPs that occur with a verb: e.g., Jack and Jill are arguments of loves in Jack loves Jill. argument structure - The various NPs that occur with particular verbs, called its arguments: e.g., intransitive verbs take a subject NP only; transitive verbs take both a subject and direct object NP. article (Art) - One of several subclasses of determiners: e.g., the, a. articulatory phonetics - The study of how the vocal tract produces speech sounds; the physiological characteristics of speech sounds. asemic - Lacking meaning, often used to describe pseudo-writing. aspirated - Describes a voiceless stop produced with a puff of air that results when the vocal cords remain open for a brief period after the release of the stop: e.g., the [p h ] in pit. See unaspirated. assimilation rules/assimilation - A phonological process that changes feature values of segments to make them more similar: e.g., a vowel becomes [+nasal] when followed by [+nasal] consonant. Also called feature-spreading rules. asterisk - The symbol * used to indicate ungrammatical or anomalous examples: e.g., *cried the baby, *sincerity dances. Also used in historical and comparative linguistics to represent a reconstructed form. auditory phonetics - The study of the perception of speech sounds. autoantonym - A word that has two opposite meanings: e.g., cleave, 'to split apart' or 'to cling together.' See antonymic pair. automatic machine translation - The use of computers to translate from one language to another. See source language, target language. Aux - A syntactic category containing auxiliary verbs and abstract tense morphemes that function as the heads of sentences (S or TP or IP). It is also called INFL. auxiliary verb - A verbal element, traditionally called a "helping verb," that co-occurs with, and qualifies, the main verb in a verb phrase with regard to such properties as tense: e.g., have, be, will. babbling - Speech sounds produced in the first few months after birth that gradually come to include only sounds that occur in the language of the household. Deaf children babble with hand gestures. baby talk - A certain style of speech that many adults use when speaking to children that includes among other things exaggerated intonation. See motherese, childdirected speech (CDS). back-formation - Creation of a new word by removing an affix from an old word: e.g., donate from donation; or by removing what is mistakenly considered an affix: e.g., edit from editor. backtracking - The process of undoing an analysis—usually a top-down analysis—when sensory data indicates it has gone awry, and beginning again at a point where the analysis is consistent with the data: e.g., in the syntactic analysis of The little orange car sped, analyzing orange as a noun, and later reanalyzing it as an adjective. See top-down processing. base - Any root or stem to which an affix is attached. bidialectal - Persons who know two or more dialects and speak the one most appropriate to the sociolinguistic context, often mixing the several dialects. See codeswitching. bilabial - A sound articulated by bringing both lips together. bilingualism - The ability to speak two (or more) languages with native or near native proficiency, either by an individual speaker (individual bilingualism) or within a society (societal bilingualism). bilingual language acquisition - The (more or less) simultaneous acquisition of two or more languages before the age of three years such that each language is acquired with native competency. bilingual maintenance (BM) - Education programs that aim to maintain competence in both languages for the entire educational experience. birdcall - One or more short notes that convey messages associated with the immediate environment, such as danger, feeding, nesting, and flocking. bird song - A complex pattern of notes used to mark territory and to attract mates. blend - A word composed of the parts of more than one word: e.g., smog from smoke + fog. blocked - A derivation that is prevented by a prior application of morphological rules: e.g., when Commun + ist entered the language, words such as Commun + ite (as in Trotsky + ite) or Commun + ian (as in grammar + ian) were not needed and were not formed. borrowing - The incorporating of a loan word from one language into another: e.g., English borrowed buoy from Dutch. See loan word. bottom-up processing - Data-driven analysis of linguistic input that begins with the small units like phones and proceeds stepwise to increasingly larger units like words and phrases until the entire input is processed, often ending in a complete sentence and semantic interpretation. See top-down processing. bound morpheme - A morpheme that must be attached to other morphemes: e.g., -ly, -ed, non-. Bound morphemes are prefixes, suffixes, infixes, circumfixes, and some roots such as cran in cranberry. See free morpheme. broadening - A semantic change in which the meaning of a word changes over time to become more encompassing: e.g., dog once meant a particular breed of dog. Broca, Paul - A French neurologist of the nineteenth century who identified a particular area of the left side of the brain as a language center. Broca's aphasia - See agrammatism. Broca's area - A front part of the left hemisphere of the brain, damage to which causes agrammatism or Broca's aphasia. Also called Broca's region. calligraphy - The decorative art of writing or drawing letters, especially Chinese characters. case - A characteristic of nouns and pronouns, and in some languages articles and adjectives, determined by their function in the sentence, and generally indicated by the morphological form of the word: e.g., I is in the nominative case of the firstperson singular pronoun in English and functions as a subject; me is in the accusative case and functions as an object. case endings - Suffixes on a noun based on its grammatical function, such as 's of the English genitive case indicating possession: e.g., Robert's sheepdog. case morphology - The process of inflectional morphemes combining with nouns to indicate the grammatical relation of the noun in its sentence: e.g., in Russian, the inflectional suffix -a added to a noun indicates that the noun is an object. case theory - The study of thematic roles or grammatical case in languages of the world. cause/causative - The thematic role of the noun phrase whose referent is a natural force that is responsible for a change: e.g., the wind in The wind damaged the roof. cerebral hemispheres - The left and right halves of the brain, joined by the corpus callosum. characters (Chinese) - The units of Chinese writing, each of which represents a morpheme or word. See ideogram, ideograph, logograms. Chicano English (ChE) - A dialect of English spoken by some bilingual Mexican Americans in the western and southwestern United States. child-directed speech (CDS) - The special intonationally exaggerated speech that some adults sometimes use to speak with small children, sometimes called baby talk. See motherese. circumfix - A bound morpheme, parts of which occur in a word both before and after the root: e.g., ge—t in German geliebt, 'loved,' from the root lieb. classifier - A grammatical morpheme that marks the semantic class of a noun: e.g., in Swahili, nouns that refer to human artifacts such as beds and chairs are prefixed with the classifiers ki if singular and vi if plural; kiti, 'chair' and viti, 'chairs.' click - A speech sound produced by sucking air into the mouth and forcing it between articulators to produce a sharp sound: e.g., the sound often spelled tsk. clipping - The deletion of some part of a longer word to give a shorter word with the same meaning: e.g., phone from telephone. See abbreviation. closed class - A category, generally a functional category, that rarely has new words added to it: e.g., prepositions, conjunctions. See open class. coarticulation - The transfer of phonetic features to adjoining segments to make them more alike: e.g., vowels become [+nasal] when followed by consonants that are [+nasal]. cocktail party effect - An informal term that describes the ability to filter out background noise and focus on a particular sound source or on a particular person's speech. coda - One or more phonological segments that follow the nucleus of a syllable: e.g., the /st/ in /prist/ priest. codeswitching - The movement back and forth between two languages or dialects within the same sentence or discourse. cognates - Words in related languages that developed from the same ancestral root, such as English man and German Mann. coinage - The construction and/or invention of new words that then become part of the lexicon: e.g., podcast. collocation analysis - Textual analysis that reveals the extent to which the presence of one word influences the occurrence of nearby words. comparative linguistics - The branch of historical linguistics that explores language change by comparing related languages. comparative method - The technique linguists use to deduce forms in an ancestral language by examining corresponding forms in several of its descendant languages. comparative reconstruction - The deducing of forms in an ancestral language of genetically related languages by application of the comparative method. competence, linguistic - The knowledge of a language represented by the mental grammar that accounts for speakers' linguistic ability and creativity. For the most part, linguistic competence is unconscious knowledge. complement - The constituent(s) in a phrase other than the head that complete(s) the meaning of the phrase and which is C-selected by the verb. The right sister to the head in the X-bar schema. In the verb phrase found a puppy, the noun phrase a puppy is a complement of the verb found. complementary distribution - The situation in which phones never occur in the same phonetic environment: e.g., [p] and [pʰ] in English. See allophone. complementary pair - Two antonyms related in such a way that the negation of one is the meaning of the other: e.g., alive means not dead. See gradable pair, relational opposites. complementizer (C) - A syntactic category, also functional category, of words, including that, if, whether, that introduce an embedded sentence: e.g., his belief that sheepdogs can swim, or, I wonder whether sheepdogs can swim. The head of a complementizer phrase (CP) in the X-bar schema. The complementizer has the effect of turning a sentence into a complement. complementizer phrase (CP) - An X-bar phrase whose specifier may be a preposed whword, whose head C may be a complementizer and possibly a preposed Aux, and whose complement is S or TP. compositional semantics - A theory of meaning that calculates the truth values or meanings of larger units by the application of semantic rules to the truth values or meanings of smaller units. compound - A word composed of two or more words, which may be written as a single word or as words separated by spaces or hyphens: e.g., dogcatcher, dog biscuit, dog-tired. Fromkin, Victoria; Rodman, Robert; Hyams, Nina (). An Introduction to Language (Page 560). Cengage Textbook. Kindle Edition. computational forensic linguistics - A sub-area of forensic linguistics that concerns itself with computer applications in matters involving language, the law, and the judicial system. computational lexicography - The building of electronic dictionaries suitable for use by computational linguists. computational linguistics - A subfield of linguistics and computer science that is concerned with the computer processing of human language. computational morphology - The programming of computers to analyze the structure of words. computational phonetics and phonology - The programming of computers to analyze the speech signal into phones and phonemes. computational pragmatics - The programming of computers to take context and situation into account when determining the meanings of expressions. computational semantics - The programming of computers to determine the meanings of words, phrases, sentences, and discourse. computational syntax - The programming of computers to analyze the structures of sentences. See parse, bottom-up processing, top-down processing. concatenative (speech) synthesis - The computer production of speech based on assembling prerecorded human pronunciations of basic units such as phones, syllables, morphemes, words, phrases, or sentences. concordance - An alphabetical index of the words in a text that gives the frequency of each word, its location in the text, and its surrounding context. conditioned sound change - Historical phonological change that occurs in specific phonetic contexts: e.g., the voicing of /f/ to [v] when it occurs between vowels. connectionism - Modeling grammars through the use of networks consisting of simple neuron-like units connected in complex ways so that different connections vary in strength, and can be strengthened or weakened through exposure to linguistic data. For example, in phonology there would be stronger connections among /p/, /t/, and /k/ (the voiceless stops and a natural class) than among /p/, /n/, and /i/. In morphology there would be stronger connections between play/played and dance/ danced than between play and danced. Semantically, there would be stronger connections between melody and music than between melody and sheepdog. Syntactically, there would be stronger connections between John loves Mary and Mary is loved by John than between John loves Mary and Mary knows John. connotative meaning/connotation - The evocative or affective meaning associated with a word. Two words or expressions may have the same denotative meaning but different connotations: e.g., president and commander-in-chief. consonant - A speech sound produced with some constriction of the air stream. See vowel. consonantal - The phonetic feature that distinguishes the class of obstruents, liquids, and nasals, which are [+consonantal], from other sounds (vowels and glides), which are [-consonantal]. consonantal alphabet - The symbols of a consonantal writing system. Fromkin, Victoria; Rodman, Robert; Hyams, Nina (). An Introduction to Language (Page 560). Cengage Textbook. Kindle Edition.